Bazaar-NG

14 Mar 2005

Canonical, the guys behind Ubuntu Linux, seem to be creating a "next-generation distributed version control system" called Bazaar-NG. It's written in Python and is primarily tested on Ubuntu. I haven't played with it but it seems it is already self-hosting, that demonstrates a bit of its capabilities. They have excellent documentation already. Although, I am wondering how they are going to handle the 'distributed' part.

Comments

Ramaswamy: I remember reading something about that in the [FAQ][1], now that I re-read it, I discover that Bazaar was a fork of GNU Arch and this particular Bazaar-NG (Next Generation) is a "from-scratch project trying to take the best ideas from Baz and also from other projects"!

[1]: http://bazaar-ng.org/faq.html

S Chris Smith says:

What requirements does this meet that Subversion does not? I think there is a distribution
choices, where the too few and too many tails are both unhelpful...

The advantage of baz-ng over Subversion and CVS is that it is a distributed system. Subversion and CVS are centralized systems with one canonical repository for each project. In contrast, with distributed systems like baz-ng (or Arch), developers can work together on the same project without needing write access to each-other's repositories, with features that make it easy to merge some or all of each other's changes. It's freedom baby, yeah!

Rams says:

Check out svk - It is based on subversion and provides a somewhat similar distributed system.

Rams says:

IIRC, It's actually an attempt to simplify Tom Lord's Arch ( TLA ) - TLA has about 120 commands; Contrast this with subversion which has only about 20 cmds. Note that I am not trying to plug either ;-).

Feedback

There's no comment box, but please do email me or tweet me your
thoughts and criticisms, and I will publish the relevant ones here.